The first thing most people involved in London 2012 took after the Olympic
Games was a holiday. Debbie Jevans took a job rescuing the next biggest
event Britain has hosted this century.

“I finished on the Friday and started this on the Monday,” said the former Locog director of sport, marking a year since she was parachuted in as chief executive of England Rugby 2015 and the two-year countdown to the World Cup itself.

If Jevans was looking for a change of pace from what Lord Coe last week described as an “unrelenting” seven-year build-up to the Olympics and Paralympics, she made the wrong choice.

But the woman as responsible as anyone for helping London to deliver what she has no qualms ­calling “arguably the best Olympic Games ever” gives the impression sat in her incongruously-modest office in the shadow of Twickenham Stadium that she revels in the pressure of performing the same trick in rugby.

“It’d have been nice to have more sleep to begin with,” she joked when discussing the size of the task she inherited after Paul Vaughan was jettisoned over concerns the World Cup would not live up to what had been a smash-hit Olympics. She added more seriously: “I haven’t regretted it for one single moment.”

Neither has the Rugby Football Union, with Jevans having sprinkled some much-needed London 2012 gold dust into the fabric of the World Cup organising committee.

The formula has been simple: populate the senior management team with fellow Locog veterans. Cynics would call it ‘jobs for the boys’ but Jevans said: “Why wouldn’t I employ the people who just delivered arguably the best Olympics Games ever?”

You could almost hear the same argument being made by RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie upon turning to Jevans, an appointment that might have initially stuck in the throats of those Will Carling once branded the “old farts”.

For Jevans, there has not been the merest whiff of sexism since she started. “I’m ultimately an RFU appointment and I’m sitting here as the first female to do this job. Actions often speak louder than words.”

They did just that through her work at London 2012, where she was a renowned problem-solver.

That reputation has been further enhanced by what has been thrown at her in her new job, not least in terms of the World Cup match schedule, which was finally unveiled in May after “tough” last-minute negotiations saw her offset the loss of Old Trafford by securing the Olympic Stadium.

One problem, however, is proving even more taxing and could spoil her promise to make the tournament affordable for all – and has even more sinister implications. Jevans has been on something of a crusade to get the unauthorised resale of World Cup tickets banned since she took over but her zeal has so far failed to produce the desired result.

It has long been against the law to sell on tickets for football matches in the UK, while one of the conditions of London being awarded the Olympics and Paralympics was the introduction of similar legislation to cover the Games.

Jevans saw first-hand how that all but eradicated ticket fraud at London 2012, something that makes the International Rugby Board and England Rugby 2015’s failure to make similar demands for the World Cup prior to her arrival all the more galling.

“We have worked really hard to make our tickets accessible and have accessible prices,” she said, having pledged that those would start at £7. “I don’t want them bought up by sophisticated touting operations that mean I then see them on a website the next day for five times as much and price people out of the market.”

Software now exists that allows touts to hoover up hundreds of tickets at a time for sporting events, concerts and exhibitions, and the World Cup is likely to be the goose that laid the golden egg.

Indeed, the policeman responsible for ensuring “not one single counterfeit ticket” was sold at London 2012 warned failure to act before the tournament would result in the public being “fleeced” by touts and robbed by the operators of fraudulent websites.

Insisting he was “100 per cent” behind legislation, Detective Superintendent Nick Downing, who headed up the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Podium, added: “They are ­making hundreds of thousands, if not millions, from this type of crime and we’ve got intelligence that some of these networks are involved in drugs, involved in firearms.”

Supt Downing insisted legislation was the only enforceable safeguard against the touts and criminals, while Jevans said: “We’ll continue to push until the last possible moment, whatever that may be.”

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is sympathetic to Jevans but the only realistic hope for legislation to be passed before the next election is for police to tell the Home Secretary it is necessary to protect the public.

For now, Jevans has little option but to plough on with England Rugby 2015’s current ticketing strategy, which is close to being finalised and will be unveiled at the end of November. It has already been confirmed they will be priced between £7 and £715 — the latter being top whack for the final at Twickenham — in order to fulfil an £80 million revenue pledge to the International Rugby Board.

There will be between 2.3 million and 2.5 million tickets in total, meaning a minimum average price of £32-£35, although most spectators will pay significantly less.

Jevans said: “I want it to be a complete sell-out. In my head, it has to be, because that is one of the things that will be ‘success’.”

But simply selling tickets was not enough at London 2012, which was dogged by no-shows from non-paying spectators. “What you didn’t have were empty seats with people who had actually bought a ticket,” said Jevans, who insisted the World Cup matches would not be inundated with invisible hangers-on.

To fill a seat, a ticketholder must first get to the stadium and Jevans admitted the greatest challenge for World Cup organisers was the same as that faced by their London 2012 counterparts. “We’ve got to the get the transport right. People come, they watch the rugby, they get home safely and they get home quickly.”

It seems home is something Jevans is unlikely to see much of in the next two years.